Appetite
by pippermint
Summary: For Peter, it was never, ever enough. Now it's only a matter of time until the hunger breaks him. Petrellicest, spoilers for 4x13.


Written for A Little Piece of Heaven's _Seven Deadly Sins_ challenge. Reviews are greatly appreciated. (: This is also posted at LJ; you can find the link on my profile.

**Prompt:** Gluttony   
**Disclaimer:** Heroes belongs to Tim Kring, NBC, yadda yadda. I own nothing.   
**Spoilers** up to around 4x13.

He moved downstairs with the grace his parents had always found him lacking in, down to the murmuring masses and polite clinking of silverware on Angela Petrelli's best china. Not yet visible was the indignant blonde head moving among the masses of dark suits and understated jewelry, but he paused, uncertainty pinning him to the bottom step. Talking to Claire was something that he had not taken into account, but he was sure that she'd be there within the hour. Could he handle it? He squeezed his eyes closed until flammable reds and oranges, so like the lights that lit the room from the ceiling, bloomed in his brain. Yes, he could. She was _his_ daughter, but she was Peter's niece, and he was still enough in control to offer comfort in addition to playing the role of the grief-stricken younger brother.

A woman approached him, presumably to offer her condolences, and the part of his conscious he'd reserved for things like this floated up to answer the question he hadn't expected. "Accident. Tragic accident." Cordial, he hoped. She moved away in a minute, anyway, and that's all he'd really wanted.

When he was twelve, his science class had learned about icebergs. Specifically, about how the visible floating white is not even half, not even a fourth of the actual heft.

The grief was above the surface, out for anyone to console him about; below, the perverse hunger swirled into solidity, so hot that he felt cold whenever it was gone. Which, now, was never. Downstairs, among decent company, he focused on Nathan throwing the baseball too wide, Nathan with his wife and sons, Nathan hard at work with the campaign. Upstairs, it grew, twisting frozen and brutal into the small of his back. Constantly growing deeper, constantly threatening to break through.

He had to compartmentalize—shut off one of the two connections that still bound him to the deceased—before the hunger, the inextinguishable fucking _want_, resurfaced. It would leave him dry-heaving in dark rooms, knees buckled against the hardwood, begging for anything. A hand trailing down the lean length of his torso. Cynical, sweet lips at the corner of his mouth, only palpable because that's where they belonged. The intoxication of skin and sin. It would break him, and it was coming, but he would hold it off for as long as he could. He had a knack for prolonging the inevitable, he thought.

The image of a falling body rushed behind his eyes. His guard against thoughts like those had fallen for a brief moment and that was all it took: the rushing undertow of hunger—Nathan, Nathan, _oh,_ _Nathan_—nearly dragged him down and out. He gripped the corner of an ornate table until the worst of it was over, then continued across the room as if nothing except the obvious was amiss.

It was never, never enough. He was seventeen and molding a girl's shapely, pale hips under him in her bedroom, on her too-squeaky bed. She was close around him, smothering; her soft sounds of encouragement were not enough. Imagining, perversely at that time, a more familiar face over her own, complete with five-o'-clock shadow. A smile, equal parts intelligence and infuriating arrogance. The neighbors were too near, so he buried his scream in the young woman's pillow as everything went gold and sharp and molten.

He was twenty, and the sheer sight of the sleek gray-silver car rounding the corner made his body heat up. Four months into whatever it was they were doing, and already Peter didn't know or care how it had begun. Only that it was there, whenever they were alone—only when they were alone—and the feeling of never being satisfied retreated behind their wordless sounds. It hid under the thin, cheap motel mattress; beneath the kitchen counter; between the carpet soft against his back and the erratically creaking floorboards.

He was twenty-three; it was never, ever enough. He had expected to shed the hunger like all the other unfortunate skins of adolescence, but it lingered, bringing heat when he needed it the least. In the corners of his eyes at holidays, making him grasp out for a knee—to the right, Nathan was always seated to his right—under their ornate family dinner table. Swatted away, because it was Thanksgiving,_ goddamn it, Pete_. He shook perceptibly. He ate and drank anything to distract the carving knife of hunger that threatened to cleave his mind and life in two.

Sometimes, he thought, it would have been better if this had never happened at all. But the slick sheets and slick foreheads—quiet, slipping escapes a minute or two afterward (or in the morning, if Nathan condescended to fall asleep too soon) made it worthwhile. It was bottomless, the want he felt, but it felt damned good to try to fill it.

Sometimes, whenever he was as close to sated as he ever would be, he wondered. Was Nathan hungry too? Peter liked to think so. The love they presented to the world didn't explain why they fucked like animals behind closed doors. Nothing did, so Peter concluded that the want—the hunger, the iceberg, the knife—was not only his to bear. He never spoke of it, and now he never could.

It would break him and him alone.

Memory swirled away down the drain. He and Claire were in the kitchen, and he vaguely remembered retreating there to get away from the socializing. The odor of lemons and limes cut the air, stinging him. Claire flinched at the table; the yellow and green mixed with red until he snapped partially back to reality and got a bandage from one of the cabinets.

"You must have a million stories."

He blinked, because the irony was sending chills through the suit to his bones. The need to go back into the fray became too great, and she must have noticed something, because the smile she'd been keeping up so well faltered in the second or so before he made up his mind to walk out.

He'd take the stories, the memories, the want, and everything else to the grave.  He ate furiously for three days, polishing off half the rhubarb pie in his mother's kitchen, the cold stuffing studded with not-quite-soft pieces of bread crust, the pint of vanilla fudge ice cream so long frozen that he nearly cut his tongue on it. None of the food came back up, but the way it sat heavy and unfulfilling in his stomach made him wish that it would.

His hair was uncombed and unwashed; his body was clad in the same clothes he'd been wearing that stifling night, minus tie and jacket and belt. He shifted into an uneasy, clouded sleep with his back against the cabinets.

It had never been enough. Now it would be even less.


End file.
